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Final Fantasy XII's willingness to be different and innovative has left it feeling every bit as modern and poignant now as any new JRPG on the market, and it remains my favourite game within a series that I hold very precious to me.
Damascus Gear is fun. It's clean, well-playing fun. It could have been an awful lot more, and it's a little frustrating that the game didn't make better use of the opportunities that the setting provided it. It's also not a game that you'll remember a year down the track, let alone feel nostalgic for in a decade. But it's, again, good clean fun, and if you've got a weekend to kill, this one will do it.
Chess Ultra is as good as I can conceive Chess actually getting.
As with most Falcom games, the game feel is straightforward and kinetic, paired with a vanilla aesthetic that's more inoffensive than groundbreaking. I can't fault a game for not being ambitious enough when it's following a tried and true formula and does it without any perceivable blemishes at all.
Pixel Heroes is some good old classic dungeon crawling action. The lack of narrative context makes it a tough, but not necessarily rewarding game, but putting that aside, the endless gameplay loop is simple and clean, and there's a fun combat system to make it all worth at least a little of your time.
Ultra Despair Girls might be an outlier, and even a game that only the most hardcore Danganronpa fans will ever truly appreciate, but underneath that hood, it's a smart one, and has a wicked sense of humour to boot. [OpenCritic note: Matt Sainsbury separately reviewed the PS4 (4 stars) and Vita (4.5 stars) versions. Their scores have been averaged.]
DiRT 4 might not be my kind of racing game normally, and nothing will ever compare with the thrill of weaving in and out of a clustered mass in an F1 game, but I genuinely enjoyed everything the game offered, and on that basis I know that it must be something special indeed.
Valkyria Revolution is an intense, special, and downright important game, with a powerful message to share not just about war itself, but also how we also talk about, and share stories about, war.
Perception was an opportunity. It was a real, genuine opportunity to do something remarkable with the horror genre, and join a couple of other experimental 'walking simulators' such as Layers of Fear, Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, and the recently-released The Town Of Light, in proving that the horror genre in video games can be cerebral, rather than visceral, but this one largely misses the mark.
The general ignorance of the west towards Japanese folk stories and philosophy mean that this is a game that a lot of people will scratch their heads over. This includes those that generally likes the games that Japanese creators make with the western market in mind. But I hope it's a game that others embrace as a stepping stone towards understanding a history and culture that too many are too eager to dismiss as "weird" or different.
Victor Vran is a cut-price Diablo clone that has a really delightful sense of humour, superb production values, and genuinely entertaining gameplay.
Neko Navy is a delightful little indie shmup, full of cute characters and oddball humour. It may lack the depth of some of its more established peers, but it's got plenty of challenge to offer nonetheless, while a smooth difficulty curve means newcomers aren't entirely left out in the dark. It's probably not going to go down as one of the shmup greats, but its quirky charm alone is enough to warrant a look.
Mages of Mystralia has a lot of heart, and was very easy for me to put aside the flaws that I encountered because working through the game was incredibly fun.
With the right crowd of people, AstroDuel is a neat distraction which remixes classic game mechanics into a frenetic party experience. It doesn't last long however, and once the initial novelty has worn off there's not much reason to return to this one.
Mighty Gunvolt Burst is a great example of a mixed game.
Players may feel like a change of pace, and driving headlong into traffic is always fun in video game land, but quite how the developers managed to make something like this so lacking in excitement is quite beyond me.
If you've somehow missed all the other Harvest Moon games on the 3DS, then you could get a real kick out of Skytree Village, but at this stage the only people in that position will be the people that either don't own a 3DS (and this game won't be enough to buy one for, that's for certain), or people who aren't interested in Harvest Moon in the first place, and this game won't turn them onto the series either
Empathy wants to be a narrative-first game, that much is clear. But the constant distractions, menial busywork, and tedious puzzles constantly distract from the pacing that's so critical to a story like this, and the end result is something that doesn't really work well as either a puzzle game or a narrative experience.
It might not have the charm of Harvest Moon, but there's a purity to the experience in Farming Simulator 18 that also means it avoids the irritants.
I cannot thank the developer enough for The Town of Light. Not only are we beginning to acknowledge the injustices our ancestors committed, we are exploring how to prevent it from happening again by telling these important stories instead of burying them.